“There are a lot of races that will be impacted by African-American and Hispanic voters in crucial states, and we had a lot of candidates stress that they need these votes to win,” DNC spokeswoman Amaya J. Smith said.

She said the DNC is running a national ad campaign targeting black and Hispanic voters. It also is funding phone banks and has people on call to take voters to the polls.

“We are reaching out to people who we know are our voters but may not have come out in the last election,” Miss Smith said.

The difference is the party is not outsourcing its get-out-the-vote operations as it has in the past, said Donna Brazile, a political consultant who heads the DNC Voting Rights Institute.

She said that for the first time in recent memory, the party is taking its political destiny in its own hands, with the operations all being managed by people with experience turning out black and Hispanic voters in their specific cities and states.

“They have been remarkable in correcting the mistakes of the past, and this is the best work I’ve seen for a midterm election,” Miss Brazile said.

Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District’s nonvoting representative, has warned the party for years about the importance of ensuring black voters get to the polls.

“I think they understand that the black vote is a solid, sure vote that you don’t have to wonder about,” Mrs. Norton said.

According to exit polls in 2004, black voters constituted 11 percent of the electorate, and 88 percent voted for Democrat John Kerry. The impact of black voters in key states is even larger. In Maryland, for example, 23 percent of voters in 2004 were black, and 93 percent of those voted to re-elect Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski, a Democrat.

Historically, Mrs. Norton said, both Republicans and Democrats have underestimated the difficulty in turning out voters for midterm elections, but she said Republicans woke up to that fact in 1994 when they used their get-out-the-vote efforts to wrest control of Congress.

“What gives me hope is that the poll figures are so much better for us than they were for the Republicans in 1994, also a non-presidential year,” Mrs. Norton said. But, she added, “Republicans didn’t have the turnout machine that they have now and their turnout is better than ours.”

Longtime Democratic pollster Ron Lester said Republicans have had more time to perfect their turnout strategies.

Mr. Lester, who lives in Prince George’s County, has polled Maryland elections for decades. He said his main problem has been that the national Democratic Party never communicated with the local party and had no system in place to track its voters.